ThomasAdès CBE

Press

• Czech Philharmonic

  Dvořák Hall, Prague

  Dec 2025

  • Thomas Adès has described composing as “organizing chaos”. If his recent appearance with the Czech Philharmonic is any indication, the same might be said of his conducting. Adès strode onstage like a man on a mission, took a gracious moment to connect with the audience, raised his arms and unleashed an evening of controlled bedlam. The only thing missing was the flash and crackle of actual fireworks bursting in the background.

    • Bachtrack
    • 08 December 2025

• London Symphony Orchesta

  Barbican Centre, London

  Oct 2025

  • Adès makes a big impression on the concert platform. He’s tall and fit. His fast, crisp baton movements start from near the floor, with knees bent deep, and reach the top of an arm stretched high above his head, the conductor on tiptoe. This gives him an exceptional range of movement with which to point out his desired dynamics, even in Sibelius’ frequent sudden dynamic shifts. He can be balletic in his movements, albeit without histrionics: it’s the orchestra’s attention that Adès seems to crave, not the audience’s.

    • Bachtrack
    • 24 October 2025

  • In Sibelius’s Symphony No 3, horns cut through string agitations like beams of light, pizzicato were mellow and timpani strokes elemental, the orchestral coordination absolute throughout. The finale surged euphorically towards its closing C major triads. Those came to seem all the more luminous when followed by Adès’s own Aquifer, which rolls and rumbles, thunders and subsides in waves of constant, polychrome orchestral motion. In this flamboyantly high-definition performance, it was an exhilarating send-off.

    • The Guardian
    • 20 October 2025

• London Symphony Orchestra

  Barbican Centre

  Nov 2024

  • Symphonies by Beethoven, the First and the Fourth, topped and tailed the concert. With such a demanding work as the centrepiece of the programme they could have been routinely efficient performances, but these were anything but routine. The First in particular was transformed by the urgency with which Adès approached it, every rhythm pin-point sharp, every dynamic contrast fiercely underlined, to leave the symphony’s Haydnesque beginnings far behind, while the Fourth was disarmingly witty and exhilarating, with superb solo woodwind playing (from the flute and bassoon especially), and faultlessly crisp strings.

    • The Guardian
    • 01 November 2024

• Adès, Leith, Tippet / Hallé

  Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

  Apr 2024

  • Adès prefaced Tevot with Elgar’s Sospiri, drawing almost symphonic intensity from what is at first sight just a salon piece, but then demonstrated that his own work has a power that really deserves the word symphonic. Played as magnificently as this, Tevot becomes an immense statement, whichfollows its own irrefutable musical logic while also seeming – for me at least – to conjure up echoes of late Mahler (of the 10th symphony especially); it’s undoubtedly one of Adès’s finest achievements.

    • The Guardian
    • 07 April 2024

  • Conducted by Thomas Adès, the Hallé Orchestra threw everything at this concert — and I don’t just mean the huge array of bells, vast and small, assembled for Oliver Leith’s new piece. That came as the climax to a stupendous first half that must have left the players gasping for their interval beverage. And they still had an intense miniature by Elgar (the tiny but tragically hued Sospiri) and Adès’s own 2007 masterpiece Tevot to come. Concerts like this renew one’s faith in the ability of British orchestras not just to survive but to flourish, startle and exhilarate even in these problematic times. Adès’s Tevot also requires a vast orchestra, especially in the jangling percussion department, but it’s a very different piece: a 20-minute epic in which a dark mass of sound seems to journey through storms of high-frequency, high-velocity clouds before reaching a point of ethereal beauty and comparative repose. The title has Hebrew biblical connotations, referencing Noah’s ark and the infant Moses’s basket; hearing it at the present time certainly made one reflect on the need for safe passages through times of turmoil.

    • The Times
    • 08 April 2024

• Adès, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius / London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Royal Festival Hall, London

  Feb 2023 - Feb 2023

  • If the illustrative music on display wasn’t vivid enough, further attack came from Adès’s exceedingly physical podium manner.

    • The Times
    • 23 February 2023

  • Thomas Adès’ "Tempest" Symphony proved a shapely and gorgeous precis of his 2004 opera in a concert conducted by the composer himself. Tchaikovsky’s “Fantasy after Dante” Francesca da Rimini made a rip-roaring end to the concert, the orchestra at full throttle, and Adès steadily ratcheting up the excitement.

    • The Guardian
    • 23 February 2023

  • Adès drew characterful playing from the LPO, especially fine in the sparsely-scored Berceuse and Ariel’s Song. Sections like The Feast demonstrate Adès’ vivid orchestrational mastery, harp, piano and glockenspiel tickling the ear as Ariel conjures up a feast for the shipwreck survivors. Tchaikovsky’s "Francesca da Rimini" was given an impulsive, no holds barred reading that saw Adès driving the LPO at full throttle.

    • Bachtrack
    • 23 February 2023

• "The Dante Project" / The Royal Ballet

  Royal Opera House, London

  Oct 2021 - Oct 2021

  • It is Adès’s score (which the composer conducts) that really sets the tone. Full of riches, it shimmers, growls and rumbles, glints and slides. In Inferno he’s definitely in the devil-has-the-best-tunes camp, sometimes soaring into Romanticism, sometimes rollicking like a night at the circus. It’s so far from the kind of music McGregor usually choreographs and it forces new invention, making dance to relish, more classical than usual in places, but also more characterful, even comical.

    • The Guardian
    • 15 October 2021

  • The real triumph of the evening is Adès’s score, which the composer conducts himself. It’s a sweeping work of fantastic orchestral colours and intense contemporary drama, yet harking back to a romantic age and not afraid to be playful and melodic when called for.

    • The Times
    • 15 October 2021

• "Winterreise" CD

  w/ Ian Bostridge

  Aug 2019 - Aug 2019

  • Right from the footstep tread launching the first song, Adès’s piano accompaniment never falters in its imaginative response to imagery and emotional mood, sometimes acting in counterpoint, sometimes allied. Frozen teardrops? A barking dog? The leaves on a tree? We see them in sound. Elsewhere, it’s their sheer detachment that make Adès’s notes so devastating, helping to build the cycle’s mounting atmosphere of desolation — one unresolved by the organ-grinder’s cryptic appearance in the final song.

    • The Times
    • 16 August 2019

• Adès and Gerstein piano duo

  Jordan Hall, Boston

  Mar 2019 - Mar 2019

  • Ravel’s “La Valse,” the final piece, was the concert’s high point. The two were at their mind-melded best, bewitching in their rendition of the dreamy, sumptuous waltz and the grotesque currents of darkness that grasped it, conjuring up a danse macabre for a world whirling off its axis.

    • The Boston Globe
    • 09 March 2019